Two fears drove Dagan to speak. One is the fear of a comprehensive regional war that Israel would have difficulty surviving. Ariel Sharon's trauma was the Israeli defeat at Latrun in 1948. Dagan's trauma was Israel's defeat in Sinai in the opening days of October 1973. Because of this trauma, he feels a supreme moral duty to prevent an unnecessary war.

Thus even though he knew he was defying convention, he decided to speak out. He will not be party to a silence like the one that preceded the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Dagan's second concern is the status quo. Dagan is no leftist, as Likud ministers have termed him. He does not believe in peace with Syria or an immediate final-status agreement with the Palestinians. He strongly objects to establishing a Palestinian state in the 1967 lines or to any compromise on the refugees' "right of return." He does not believe in immediately evacuating the settlements.

But Dagan thinks that Israel, for its own sake, must take the initiative in the peace process. He advocates cooperating with the moderate Arab states and transferring extensive areas of the West Bank to the Palestinians. And he raised the creative idea of recognizing a Palestinian state providing that its borders remain subject to negotiation.

...He sees Saudi Arabia as the strongest, most important state in the Middle East. His support for the Saudi peace initiative (as opposed to the modified version known as the Arab Peace Initiative ) is linked to his warm regard for Riyadh and the hope that it will contribute to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the future.